The Birthing House Page 2

  Children. The relentless question childless married couples are bombarded with pretty much non-stop after age thirty.

  Is that what this was about? The way Roddy looked at you when he realized you were eyeballing a four-bedroom house with nothing but a wife and a couple of pound mutts in tow. If not to start a family, what exactly are you hoping to do here? Do you really want to move to the middle of nowhere? Sure, Los Angeles is crowded, traffic makes you homicidal, the air is a fucking smokestack, you never use the ocean, and Jo’s job is shit. But at least there’s stuff to do there. Movies, hiking, gallery parties, the best tacos in the world. Women. Ungodly women everywhere you turned. Enough to make you groan just walking down the street. A city was a space to live tightly, then stretch out your career, your lunches. A place to play around, get involved with strangers, make deals behind your employer’s back, hide.

  It was killing them, the City of Angels. He knew it was only a matter of time. It was too easy to watch five years of your life go by. People thirty, forty years old still living in apartments and driving leased BMWs, trying to hit something big. Too many casual friendships, too much need. Maybe just too many choices.

  Jo’s parents were retired - mom in Phoenix, the old man splitting time between Roxbury and London. She wasn’t any closer to them emotionally than geographically. Flying back to Connecticut for Christmas every year had become every other year, and then every third or fourth. Jo was a Wi-Fi wife, always working from home, hotels, airports. She was too busy for family. What did she care where they lived?

  Conrad’s family was Jo and the dogs. Simpler now.

  This was doable.

  The house was warm. The smell was in him. Conrad’s blood churned and his pulse escalated. The library seemed somehow familiar and foreign, a place he’d come back to after a decade of forgetting. A draft brought the clean, wild scents of nettle and lavender, overpowering the vanilla scent from the girl - forget about the girl, there was no girl - and he was not aware of the erection forming under his black Lucky Brand dungarees, only of the titillating possibility of a new environment, of new hope. Maybe even a whole new life.

  Call Jo, talk things over. Stay a few days, kick around the town.

  He dialed her mobile, got only silence. He looked at his phone. There were no signal bars. Maybe the house or the big tree out front. Or maybe the whole town was a black spot.

  Didn’t matter. That was just fear trying to slow him down. And there was another, deeper voice drowning out the fear. He did not recognize it, and it did not have a name, though in time both of those things would change. It came from the house as much as it came from his head or his heart. It was buried beneath years of stone, and it had been buried on purpose.

  This is a new beginning, it said. This is your only hope. To save the family. It is our birthing house, and we deserve to be born.

  He had no idea what the words meant, but they felt true.

  When he turned, Roddy was standing at the library’s rear entrance.

  Conrad nodded. ‘We’ll take it.’

  ‘You wanna call your wife, talk it over?’

  ‘She trusts me,’ he said. ‘And this feels like home.’

  ‘Boy, I guess she must. You have some financing arranged? I can throw you a name if you want someone local. Real honest guy down at Farmer’s -’

  ‘Not necessary.’ Conrad pulled out his wallet, removed and unfolded the little slip of paper. ‘No loans, Roddy. Just point me to a bank, give me a couple days to clear this.’

  Conrad held the check out, displaying the insurance company’s logo in some sort of hope that he wouldn’t have to explain the rest.

  Roddy took a step closer and frowned. ‘Jesus, son. That’s a big check.’

  ‘Is it?’ Conrad guessed five hundred thousand dollars was a lot. Not specific, though. Not a sum calculated by tables and software. This was the kind of round figure that suggested payoff. Considering the source it seemed insignificant.

  ‘Your last house burn down or something?’

  Conrad looked at Roddy. He hadn’t told anybody since he’d gotten the call a week ago. Jo had been in Atlanta. He told her what had happened, of course, but he hadn’t known how it would end. She offered to go with him, cancel her trip. He said no, he’d be fine. The man from Builder’s Trust Nationwide had been there at St Anthony’s, anxious to close the matter and avoid litigation, which Conrad had no interest in pursuing. He hadn’t even recognized the man in the bed until the very end, when it was like watching the man fall asleep the way he had more than twenty years ago. Even recognizing that didn’t change anything.

  ‘Construction accident,’ Conrad said.

  Roddy reared back and looked Conrad over as if he’d missed something obvious, perhaps a limp or a facial tic that would bespeak brain trauma.

  ‘My father was an electrician.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, jeez.’ Roddy was nodding. Then he stopped and ran one palm over his mouth. Conrad could see him putting it together. Living in Los Angeles. Insurance money. Got lost on the way back from Chicago. Erratic behavior, jumping into a new deal. When he spoke again, the realtor’s voice was quiet. ‘Was it . . . recent?’

  ‘Seven days ago.’

  Roddy visibly twitched at that. ‘I’m very sorry, Conrad. You must be—’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Conrad crossed the room and patted Roddy on the shoulder as he went by, suddenly wishing to be out of the library, out of town, back on the road.

  Roddy caught his arm and held him back. The big realtor’s grip was gentle, but it stopped Conrad and made him look up.

  ‘Hey. Nothing would make me happier than to sell you a house today. But I wouldn’t be doing my job unless I asked. I can sit on the property. You want to maybe take some time on this?’

  ‘I appreciate that.’ Conrad looked out the picture window facing the street and the enormous tree blocking the view. ‘Dad traveled a lot for work. Sometimes out of state. Then one time he didn’t come back. Haven’t seen him since I was six.’ He turned back to Roddy. ‘Hey, what say we just pretend I won the lottery or something, huh?’

  Roddy did not respond.

  The moment stretched out and Conrad imagined Roddy suddenly grabbing him by the arm and paddling him over one knee. He burst into uneasy titters. That seemed to help. Roddy grinned and offered his hand. Conrad shook it and held it longer than usual.

  ‘This is a fine town full of nice people, Conrad. You and your wife are gonna make a good life here.’

  ‘Thanks, Roddy. Thank you for your help.’ Shit. Now Conrad did feel like crying, but that was just gratitude, not grief. He swallowed it down.

  ‘You hungry?’

  ‘Starving. You?’

  Roddy slapped his belly. ‘My man, I love to eat.’

  They went to a lunch of the locally renowned Cornish pasty stuffed with cubed beef, potatoes, onions, and rutabaga. The miners’ dish was hard and salty, even with the cocktail sauce you were supposed to splash all over it. But Conrad was so hungry after knocking back the first three bottles of Spotted Cow he gobbled his lunch down and forgot to ask Roddy about the doctor, the girl or any other player concerning the history of the birthing house.

  3

  With its tiled roof, yellow stucco façade and rainbow of bricks that went up over the porch, the house Joanna Harrison had rented three years earlier should have been easy to love. It was a 1940s bungalow on a quiet street in Culver City, three blocks from industrial compounds, three blocks from the Sony lot and only one block from Washington Boulevard’s diners, art galleries and coffee shops. Conrad’s windfall notwithstanding, they’d be priced out of the rent in another six months and forget about qualifying for the mortgage - they’d already tried, but the land-lord was asking $670,000 and 20 per cent cash down. She’d decorated the house as if they had bought it, but to Conrad it had never felt like home. Just another temporary stop until they found the next thing.

  In the backyard was a tall avocado tree that never
produced edible fruit. He could always see them up there, ripening in the sun, until one day they dried out and fell, too young and hard or desiccated beyond consumption. He knew it was the landlord’s job, but he took the tree’s ill health personally. He felt he should be up on a ladder, pruning or doing something more so that it might yield real fruit, but he never got around to learning exactly what.

  It was just past 9 a.m. on a Tuesday when he dropped off the rental and the taxi delivered him from LAX. Her silver Volvo wagon was sitting in the driveway. So, sick or just running late, Jo was home. Good. Maybe she’d take the entire day off. He could make her her favorite omelet (red peppers and Swiss, with a dash of olive oil) and they could roll around in bed all day, open the windows and fuck the stress away the way they used to cure their hangovers.

  He moved through the living room and saw the wine bottles on the coffee table. Cigarette butts mashed into the congealed cheese on the pizza box. Candles burned down. Allison must have come over, Jo’s divorced friend with the augmented breasts and the little travel agency over in the Marina specializing in Japan. They liked to get into the wine and talk about their relationships, a once or twice a month habit Conrad dreaded not so much for the mess they always left but because he didn’t think Jo had much to learn from a woman who needed plastic tits to feel wanted.

  Alice and Luther click-click-clicked in from the bedroom, all sleepy and stiff-jointed, yawning their greetings while their tails wagged with no real enthusiasm. Alice was the brindle, her coat like that of a chocolate tiger. Luther was splotched black and white like a cow. Fifty pounds apiece, rescue muscle turned chubby and about as scary as your average golden retriever. He bent and petted them and murmured in their ears.

  He shuffled into the bedroom. Jo was sleeping on top of the spread, wearing his favorite vintage Sebadoh tee and her black lace panties, her bare feet a little dirty, her mouth open.

  Ah, beautiful wife. Even in her morning state. She was a heavy sleeper, a heavy lot of things. Worker, drinker, emoter, lover. During periods of stress, she was always moist. Her eyes, nose, mouth and loins watered up with her moods. She had irritable bowel syndrome from the work anxiety and rushed dietary choices. If she didn’t have a cold, she had allergies. If she wasn’t seething, she was lusting, and not always for sex, not always for him. In truth, she frightened him. He liked this about her; felt she kept him from becoming a snail in the great lawn of Los Angeles. If he was the snail, she was the nautilus. Curled around herself on the bed, even now, waiting for him to crawl inside.

  There was a click of door and creak of hinge in the hall behind him. Conrad turned and saw his friend, their friend, Jake Adams, standing there in those great shredded surfer-boy jeans Jake always seemed to wear, unbuttoned at the navel. Jake was an actor who’d been bumming around Los Angeles for a decade, taking bit parts in indies and the occasional episode of one failing sitcom or another, always treading water and never really making it. He was not wearing shoes, socks or shirt, and Conrad thought of telling him No Service.

  ‘Whoa, hey, ’Rad,’ Jake said, scratching his unshaven neck.

  Jo sat up as if he’d yelled her name.

  Conrad looked at Jo and then back at Jake. His next thought was, If this motherfucker came on my Sebadoh, I’ll break his head open.

  Jake wiped one corner of his mouth and bit his pinky nail. Jake’s lips were chapped raw. His eyes were red, alert.

  Are we up to coke now, Jo?

  ‘Go.’

  Jake pointed and leaned toward the bedroom as if asking permission to retrieve the rest of his clothes, but Conrad just shook his head, once. Jake blew air from his cheeks and then padded through the living room. Conrad kept his nose turned up and eyes closed until he heard the front door shut, and it was almost inaudible when it did.

  When he turned back to Jo she was staring at him, flushed, her lower lip quivering.

  ‘It’s over,’ he said.

  The color drained away. She didn’t know the lyrics, but she knew the tune.

  He patted around for it, reached into his pocket. He handed her the MLS printout Roddy had given him. There were six photos, in color. The house from the front, the sprawling backyard, the front parlor, master, full bath and library.

  She unfolded the paper, turned it sideways. She looked up, her whole face a question mark.

  ‘I signed the papers two days ago. Offer accepted.’

  She was trying to understand what was left for her to negotiate, to explain.

  ‘My father bought that for us.’

  Her expression crumpled and she coughed. He almost asked her if she was okay, but she started to cry and he was glad for that.

  ‘I called you.’ A heaving breath. ‘You should have let me come.’ A ghastly inhalation. ‘Conrad, I’m so-so-so—’

  ‘No. No going back. Not so much as one fucking minute. Start packing if you want to come. Otherwise leave the dogs and get out.’

  He went to the kitchen and grabbed a trash bag from under the sink. His fingers ripped through the plastic and he shook it open like a parachute. He grabbed the nearest thing - the toaster, fuck the toaster, they hadn’t made toast in years - and threw it in the bag so that it clanged deafeningly on the floor. You had to start by throwing a lot out. It made the packing go faster, the move a clean getaway.

  4

  They were in the house a week before it came for him.

  Joanna Harrison was dozing on the couch in the TV room while her husband stood on the deck, breathing through a sweet clove cigarette that burned his throat and floated a candy cloud above his empty thoughts. The cigarette was the kind found on the back covers of men’s magazines, the smoke of wannabes. What Conrad wanted to be this night was content, and, for a few more minutes of this vanishing sunset hour, he was.

  Content equally with himself and his lot: a full acre of sloping lawn, century-old maple and black walnut trees, and a garden as large as a swimming pool, its aged gray gate roped with grape vines. Raspberry and clover grew thick in the shade of the shaggy pines still moist with the day’s sweet rain.

  He heard running water and looked through the window into the kitchen. Her blurry, sleepy-slouched shape hovered for a moment, probably filling a glass to take to bed. He waved to her. She either did not see him or was too tired to wave back. The shape faded . . . back into the house.

  He wanted to follow her, but he waited. Let her brush and floss, finish with a shot of the orange Listerine before she turned back the freshly laundered Egyptian cotton. You can’t rush these things. These are delicate times. Eyes closed, he could almost see her stretched out in one of her tank tops and cotton boy-cut underwear, a big girl-woman reading another marketing book he always said were made for people on planes. She must be happy here. Otherwise, she would be cleaning and planning and avoiding bedtime.

  Summer had arrived early. The house was muggy. He wondered if she would be warm enough to go without covers, but cool enough to allow his touch.

  He had been shocked to discover that he wanted her more now. He was still madder than hell about the entire stupid scene and all its implications, its mysteries. But he knew the balance of things and how he’d not been holding up his share of them was half the problem. Maybe more than half. She’d almost slipped away. Even before that nasty little homecoming it had been months, and since the fresh start (that was how he thought of it, but never named it as such, not aloud) he’d been watching for signs. If Luther and Alice were in their crates, that was one sign. If she had showered that was yet another, though never a binding one. None of the signs were binding, which added suspense to the marriage and kept his hopes in a perpetual swing from boyish curiosity on one side to blood-stewing resentment on the other.

  He walked up the deck steps to the wooden walkway, into the mudroom. He climbed stairs (the servants’ stairs off the kitchen, not the front stairs with the black maple banister, which for some reason he had been avoiding since the move) and felt the weight of the day in his bones. />
  By the time he finished brushing his teeth he was tired the way only people who have unpacked 90 per cent of their possessions in a single day can be tired. His mind was empty, his muscles what his mom said his father used to call labor-fucked, the old man’s way of suggesting that work is its own reward.

  I’m sorry, Dad -

  Work. He knew his hands still worked for her. He thought she liked his hands better than just about every other part of him. He no longer relied on his appearance as the catalyst, didn’t know many men married more than a few years who did. He knew he wasn’t a Jake. At thirty he was what divorced female bartenders had from time to time called cute, no longer handsome, if he ever had been. He felt remarkably average. He had acquired a belly, but the move had already burned that down from a 36 to a 34. With the yard work he’d be down to a 32 - his high-school Levi’s size - by the end of June. Jo always said she liked his laugh lines, the spokes radiating from what his mother used to call his wily eyes. Wily used to be enough, but now he was just grateful for a second chance. He could live with average - so long as he could still seduce her.

  Conrad wound his way through the back hall, making the S-turn through the library, into the front hallway. The creaking floorboards were a new sound, allowing him to birth one final clear thought for the day.

  This is a healing place. This is home.

  Conrad waded into the moonlight pooling on the new queen-sized bed - another purchase, this one more deserved - he’d made without her input. The ceiling fan was whirring, the dogs were curled into their crates on the floor, and Jo was waiting for him on top of the new sheets. She was without a top, wearing only loose fitting boxers (his), which were somehow better than if she were naked. That she had gone halfway without prematurely forfeiting the under garment was a gesture that made him feel understood. The arc of her hips rose off the bed like the fender of a Jaguar and his blood awakened.